Wall Street’s Pandemic Bonanza

John Cassidy: “Two years to the week after the first Covid-19 cases in this country were confirmed, it’s increasingly clear who the biggest economic winners have been. The tech giants that benefited from the shift to remote work, such as Amazon and Microsoft, are the most obvious ones, but the list also includes major Wall Street banks and large financial firms.”

“Last Friday, JPMorgan Chase, the biggest bank in the country, announced that it had made a post-tax profit of $48.3 billion in 2021. Nearly fifty billion dollars. That’s about thirty-five per cent more than the thirty-six billion dollars that JPMorgan Chase made in 2019, the year before the pandemic, which was itself a record figure.”

“On Tuesday, Goldman Sachs announced record post-tax profits of $21.6 billion for 2021. The past twelve months have been such a stellar period for the firm that, according to Bloomberg News, it is preparing to give some of its most senior employees two year-end bonuses.”

“It’s hard to exaggerate the extent to which the current Wall Street bonanza is a product of the stimulative policies that the Fed and Congress introduced to lessen the pain of the pandemic.”